President Zuck

What Does Mark Zuckerberg Really Want?

If Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want people to think he’s running for president, he hasn’t been all that convincing. Last year, the billionaire Facebook C.E.O. urged his company’s board to approve a new clause that would let him retain control of Facebook if he takes a leave of absence to serve in a government position or office. He started a philanthropic organization with his wife Priscilla Chan to give away his wealth, and hired Obama’s former campaign manager to help run it. Influential people in Silicon Valley seem to think President Zuckerberg is an inevitability and plenty of political observers have been clamoring for a corporate titan like Zuckerberg or Bob Iger (not to mention Dwayne Johnson or Tom Hanks) to step up as a candidate in 2020.

None of which did much to quiet speculation that Zuckerberg has his sights set on higher office. So on Sunday night, the 33-year-old billionaire tried to tamp down the rumors again. “Some of you have asked if this challenge means I’m running for public office. I’m not,” Zuckerberg wrote in a 1,300-word post detailing a recent visit with recovering heroin addicts in Ohio, a meeting with children at a juvenile justice center in Indiana, and in Detroit, where he met with community leaders. “I’m doing it to get a broader perspective to make sure we’re best serving our community of almost 2 billion people at Facebook and doing the best work to promote equal opportunity at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.”

It’s possible that Zuckerberg is not being entirely honest here, or that he’s simply leaving his options open. The 2020 race is a long way off, not to mention 2024. There is another possibility, too, which doesn’t preclude the others. As Farhad Manjooreported last month, Zuckerberg was deeply affected by the blame Facebook received for not policing an explosion of fake and misleading news stories in the run-up to the election, which may have tipped the scales for Donald Trump. It’s an argument that President Barack Obama made himself, and that Zuckerberg took seriously. “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not, and particularly in an age of social media, where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems,” Obama said at a news conference in November, shortly after the election. “People, if they just repeat attacks enough, and outright lies over and over again, as long as it's on Facebook and people can see it, as long as it's on social media, people start believing it. And it creates this dust cloud of nonsense.” When Manjoo asked Zuckerberg whether he’d spoken with Obama about the critique, he said he had.

In his farewell address, Obama warned that Americans had retreated into “bubbles,” surrounding themselves with “people who look like us and share the same political outlook and never challenge our assumptions.” Zuckerberg, as the stewart of one of the world’s most valuable public companies, appears to take that danger seriously. In his post on Sunday night, he talked at length about strengthening “community” on Facebook. “There are a number of models for how this might work,” he said. “The Peace Corps creates service opportunities where people exchange culture and build new relationships. Perhaps we could build a new digital peace corps. Another model is Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, where people who have struggled with these challenges and overcome them go on to become mentors for others, with the hope of training them to one day become mentors themselves. This is something I've only recently started studying and working with our teams at Facebook to build.”

He is also surely attuned to the political risks inherent in the solutions Facebook has begun to implement, including using third-party fact-checkers to flag questionable news stories for users. While conservatives quickly branded that effort an attempt at censorship, Zuckerberg has been going out of his way to give Facebook—and himself—a bipartisan sheen. There was an unmistakably conservative undertone to Zuckerberg’s visit on his personal non-campaign trail, from his meetings with S.E.C. football coaches and NASCAR visits to stops at military bases and rodeos. It’s hard to imagine that any of that was by accident. Whether or not it leads to anything else, Zuckerberg’s red-state charm offensive was smart politics—and good practice for whatever comes next.